Unprecedented levels of affluence in Ireland have led to exponential growth in the private banking sector which, in turn, has fuelled a war for talent.

Advising the State's uber-rich on how best to manage their wealth is a daunting task and high-calibre relationship staff able to rise to this challenge are thin on the ground. For this reason, Bank of Ireland's private banking business has pioneered a unique training academy to build up its stock of professional wealth managers.

"Good relationship people are like hen's teeth," says David Lowen, director at Bank of Ireland Private Banking and the driving force behind the academy. "They're a very rare species and they're critical to the business.

"The wealth market has grown faster than the number of wealth managers available to deal with that market, so there's a dearth of talent in the market place, and ergo there's a war for talent."

Historically, Bank of Ireland recruited private banking staff from the market place in the same way as its competitors. Last year, it decided to take a more innovative approach.

"We felt it would be a nice idea to get ahead of the curve and to start something within the industry which would almost bring a professional-type qualification to this whole relationship management of wealth," says Lowen.

He teamed up with John Quilliam, programme director of the Trinity MBA and, over the summer of 2006, they devised a full-time six-month academy programme which would give recruits a strong grounding in private banking and relationship management. The next step was to select the academy's first recruits.

While a background in private banking wasn't a prerequisite, Lowen says that certain personality traits are a must for the specific role of relationship manager.

"You need strong interpersonal skills and you need a high level of self-confidence, a belief that you can learn something, understand it and impart it with a degree of confidence so that you're not fazed or overawed by significant wealth sitting at the other side of the desk," he says.

In the end, eight people in their early to mid-30s were recruited from diverse backgrounds, from financial services to engineering. They all had one thing in common - they exuded self-confidence. The new recruits embarked on the intensive six-month training programme, which was split 50/50 between lectures and work placement.

Just to add to the workload, they also had to take QFA (Qualified Financial Adviser) and banking institute exams alongside the academy training.

All eight students were rotated throughout the entire private banking business, spending one week in each area and then coming back into the classroom for a week. In addition to the technical modules, such as lectures on stock market investing, a strong emphasis was placed on the development of soft skills.

These ranged from presentation to learning how to identify different personality types and were aimed at helping the students to avoid the common pitfalls that catch out inexperienced relationship managers.

When you're meeting a client initially, almost 80 per cent of the time should be you listening, says Lowen by way of example.

By and large, inexperienced people meeting clients spend 80 per cent of the time talking to the client, almost afraid that if they stop talking they might lose their train of thought.

As the students approached the final two months, they began to move out much more into client-facing events, an example being accompanying existing client relationship managers to meet clients.

Their challenge was to participate in and contribute to the meeting and afterwards they received feedback on how they performed and where they could improve.

The total investment for setting up and running the course, together with recruiting the participants, was in the region of €1 million. What kind of employees has it produced?

"Coming through that six-month period, I'd say they're more effective earlier than [ through] the typical recruitment," says Lowen. "It's an excellent foundation for the rest of their learning. It's part of an ongoing process but they go in there with a huge advantage."

The recruitment process is starting all over again now for the academy's second year and the bank is looking for another eight to 10 aspiring wealth managers.

This year, Lowen has set his sights on trying to get some form of accreditation for the programme from Trinity and plans to put a much greater emphasis on gaining experience at the coalface in client-facing situations.